It's a warm fuzzy feeling when you know that the entire contents of your ribcage will soon get bitch-slapped by ionizing beams of death.. I guess that's why I had a doctor's appointment first so they could explain how they do it? Well, at least I thought it was supposed to be a brief reassuring chat but I ended up spending 3h there! At first I did go for a brief chat and of course the usual crap where they listen to your heart and lungs even though I had recently had both spirometry and heart sonography and know those are in great shape, but I guess they have to do something to earn the 30€ I spend for each doctors visit. There is no such thing as free medicare..!
Anyway, then I hear I'm supposed to get x-rayed, measured and prepped for the radiation too. (And naturally another visit the blood-lab.) So I wait outside the X-ray room for a good 20min until I get called into a big spacious room with about five people ready to take me on. First they lay me down on a moving bed with the usual doughnut-shaped x-ray machine but this room had four lasers in the roof measuring me up on the bed. The nurses rock me back and forth and keep drawing on me with markers until they get me in a good position. Suddenly they attack me with a wet, rubbery asphyxation blanket and strap it down to the bed. (Sort of like this one: Neck Fixation) Apparently they need to make sure my chin and head do not move one millimeter when the radiation starts. In very short time the blanket started to shrink and harden and really pull my face down towards the bed. That was total sci-fi stuff! =) Now they have a fixation device moulded in my image to strap me down exactly like I was. On top of that they tattooed four dots on me for where the laser pointers had been. So I didn't manage to stay untattooed for the rest of my life after all.. They will take about one week to calculate the radiation dose with some physics geeks and try a simulation run next friday. The real radiotherapy starts on Monday (22/10).
Here's a slightly better picture of the facemask:
Oh yeah, the week was not over yet.. Monday: blood test, Tuesday: gastroscopy, Wednesday: (man I hate the spelling of that day) heart sonograph/ultrasound/ultrasonography! Yeah it's that thing they do to pregnant women with the gel and scanner thingy on the stomach. Only this was aimed at my heart. They measured every ventricle, artery, atrium and valve to make sure it's in tip-top condition. Took bloody 45min too! Why? Because the radiation will be hitting not only my tumor but also my heart, left lung, trachea and esophagus. The heart should be fine but I can get some immediate symptoms from the lung, throat and skin.
Those symptoms include skin burning, heartburn (acid reflux) and "fake" pneumonia. So not real pneumonia but pretty much the same symptoms. But once again all symptoms are quite individual so you never know, I might just be compatible with radiation? ;)
Some things are, and should be, on a need-to-know-basis (at least in the movies they seem to have lots of that) and maybe that's good. When you get called to a procedure like gastroscopy it's really not good to read up about it too much and see what other people think. It builds up unnecessary anxiety. And for most people an experience like that can be quite traumatic I guess? So after reading up on it quite a lot I was a bit nervous that it would be as horrible as the lung endoscopy.. Well, it's not! Not even same ballpark! Sure you can find better things to do than puking air for 5min straight but this was just another quick stop at the docs office for me. I didn't even take the local anesthesia for this one. I came in, layed down on my left side on the bed, got a thickish (much thicker than the lung-tube) tube in my throat and tried to swallow it.. Then I started throwing up non-stop for a few minutes (which made easy access for the tube) and after a few biopsy claws had been in there, they pulled it out. I thanked for an interesting experience and walked to my car and drove home. Then I ate breakfast! Like a Boss! =)
Sure I had a bit of a sore throat afterwards, but the only thing I was interested in was the findings of the biopsy. They told me they would call me on Monday (8/10), I got the call on Thursday. No biggie, since I wasn't really that worried about it, but still kind of strange to keep me in the dark for over a week. Anyway, got the call and everything was fine as expected, so all this did was postpone the radiation for anther week. I might have some sort of chronic inflammation of the stomach wall but since I've never felt it or had any issues with it what so ever, who cares! I'm busy killing cancer!
